


Horn Trimming Day

by coastalAristocrat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Horn Care, Horn Filing, Horns, Kismesissitude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 23:05:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6927862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coastalAristocrat/pseuds/coastalAristocrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lame title, I know. But that's what this is.<br/>It's a slice-of-life featuring Nehiri and Tyrick, but as Ancestors, the Baroness and the Grand Highblood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Horn Trimming Day

The Baroness heard the light beeping of her personal comm device and rolled over, squinting. The setting sun outside her windows sent shafts of blazing gold through her violet-clad room. 

Someone had better have a good goddamn reason for waking her up at this time of day.  
Nehiri answered the comm, which went to video almost immediately, revealing the paint-faced visage of her kismesis. Of course. It -had- to be him. 

"Hey. I need a favor." He said, not really waiting for her to wake up. 

Nehiri grouchily, groggily responded, "If it doesn't involve me lighting you on fire, there had better be a good reason you're waking me up, Tyrick..."  
He rolled his eyes at her and turned to face away from the camera. 

"It's that time again." He said, knowing she'd know what he meant. He hated asking her to do this, but he knew she was the only one who he trusted to. 

Nehiri's eyes went a bit wide, seeing how close his horns were to piercing the back of his head. 

"What's gotten into you?! You never wait this long to ask me to file those back." She said, sitting up and revealing that she was in her dayrobe. "Get over here, that counts as a good enough reason, Chucklefuck."

\---

Night had fallen before the Grand Highblood made it to the Baroness's home, Arcasa Manor.  
He didn't bother to knock; she was expecting him.

Nehiri was in the parlor, reading, then Tyrick arrived. She looked up, and, with an exasperated look, stood up to lead him to her room.

"I don't understand this. You never wait this long, and it's even worse in person! I'm surprised those points aren't digging into your head already..." she said, climbing the stairs and heading for her room.

Nehiri did stop at a closet in the hall to grab what looked like a few black towels and a rolled-up tarp. It was her horn-care kit, used to do this manner of grooming for anyone who asked her to do it.

"Tyrick. Tell me straight. What in the hell possessed you to wait until now to file your horns back?" she asked, turning to face him, with the bundled-up towels in her arms. It was now apparent that she was wearing purple. His shade.

"I...Well..." Tyrick started, looking at the floor. "I...The Condesce..."

Nehiri raised an eyebrow, shaking her head. She headed on to her room, knowing he'd follow, and walked in. Nehiri tossed the kit at the bed and turned around, like she always did, just in time to watch Tyrick bow his head to enter her room.

It was a little joke she and the architect who'd edited the Manor had played; Nehiri's room was the only one whose doorframe was the original height, causing anyone as tall as, or with as large of horns as, Tyrick to have to duck to enter. All the others had been edited to allow him easier movement around the Manor.

A light smile played on her lips as she spread out the tarp on the floor in front of her bed. That was one of her favorite parts of her kismesis' visits, watching him respectfully enter her room.

"Alright. You know the drill." Nehiri said, sitting onthe bed and slipping out of her robe. "On your knees."

"Oh, come on, Iri. You don't have to say it like that." Tyrick said, grudgingly kneeling in front of her. 

"Of course I don't have to. Why do you think I do it?" she said, teasing. "But seriously, though, kneel down. You're too tall."

Tyrick huffed in aggravation as Nehiri unfolded the rolled-up file set. There were different grades of files, a handheld chainsaw, and several pairs of clippers, much like one would use to take care of hoofbeasts.

Nehiri gave Tyrick's overgrown horns a good look-over, and took a piece of chalk to them, marking where she'd have to cut to get them safely away from his skull. She plugged in what amounted to a large heat-rod, used for cauterizing the freshly-cut horns.

"This is bad, Kellen. I'm going to have to go into the orange." she said.  
"What?! No! Come on, Nehiri, please, not that far!" he said, looking up at her in disbelief. "They aren't _that_ bad, are they?!"

"Not that bad?! What the hell, Tyrick? They're your own damned horns, how did you not realize they were this overgrown?" Nehiri asked, thumping the base of the left one. "And yes, they are that bad."

"Believe me, Ty. I don't want to go that far back, but I'm going to have to, or they won't heal right." she finished, pulling out a pair of large clippers.  
As she aligned them with the chalk line on his left horn, ready to cut into it, he stopped her.

"Wait. Please, not yet. Look at them again. Leave them as long as you can this time." he asked.

Usually, Nehiri cut Tyrick's horns back to where the tips hovered a good four to five inches away from the back of his head. She looked at him in confusion, before asking, "Okay. No, really. What's gotten into you? Did someone call you 'Nubs' or something?"

The look on his painted face told her everything.

"You...Meenah called you...Oh, that's fucking rich!" Nehiri jeered, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes. "Did she really call you 'Nubs'?!"

"No! No, she didn't!" he snapped back. "She called me 'Shorthorn'."

Nehiri stopped howling with laughter for a bit. Shorthorn was less about someone's physical appearance and more about their maturity. A jab from the Condesce at her Grand Highblood being still relatively inexperienced in his station, that's what it had to have been. But still, it had stung Tyrick's ego, and Nehiri wanted to be the only one who did that, Empress or not.

"Okay. Fine. I'll leave them longer." Nehiri said, tilting Tyrick's face up to meet her eyes. "On the one condition that you come back more often so I can check up on them. Deal?"

Tyrick jerked his face out of the condescending seadweller's light grip and growled, "Sure. Fine. Just hurry up and do it so I can leave. Got a motherfuckin' graduation to preside over later..."

"Don't worry. I won't take long. But I'm warning you, this is going to bleed." she said. 

With a low growl, he laid his chin on the edge of the bed, between Nehiri's legs. She leaned forward, pressing her chest against his face, and re-positioned the clippers, this time further toward the yellow tips than before.

Tyrick put his hands up on the bed, beside her legs, before re-thinking it and actually grabbing hold of her.  
He was huge. His hands went almost all the way around her thighs, and covered most of the skin exposed by the slits in her dress. As he held onto her, she wrapped her legs around his waist, below his arms. It was easiest, due to the curve of his horns, to have him face toward her, rather than away from her.

"On three. Ready?" she asked. He nodded. "One."  
"Two."  
"Three."

There was a soft crunch, and a deep, animalistic growl ripped through Tyrick's chest. His head thrashed, spilling purple onto the tarp on the floor, before Nehiri quickly grabbed the hot iron and pressed into the cut, bleeding horn. It sizzled, making Tyrick scream and dig his nails into her thighs, drawing violet in short, deep gashes.  
Nehiri channeled her own pain and fury into pressing the iron harder into the stub, eliciting a flood of smoke from it as it sealed the wound.

"I warned you! I fucking told you, you enormous jackass! Look what you did!" Nehiri snarled, grabbing Tyrick by the throat and lifting his head. "Look at the scratches you put in me this time, look at them."

Tyrick narrowed his eyes, feeling slightly off-balance from having part of a horn missing, but looked at the weeping, bloody lines he'd left in his kismesis.

"You know that ain't the worst I've done to you." he said. "Now do the other one."

"Ask nicely, or I'll leave you to the Condesce calling you 'Lopsided' instead of anything else." she growled.  
Tyrick snarled a hasty "please", and put his chin on the bed's edge again, nearly biting the mattress. Or Nehiri's leg. He wasn't sure what he was trying to sink his teeth into; his head hurt too much for him to focus.  
Nehiri put the clippers up to the other horn, and readjusted them, to get it right, even with the other one. She didn't count down until Tyrick's hands were behind him, gripping her ankles. The countdown cadenced again, and there was another crunch.  
Tyrick growled loudly, and bit through his lip this time, letting blood flow over the facepaint he wore and onto Nehiri's lap. A second crunch followed the first; the sound of Nehiri's ankle snapping.  
More sizzling, as the heat-rod cauterized the second horn, Nehiri funneling all of her pain and anger into pushig that red-hot piece of metal into the raw pulp of her kismesis' horn.

"Tyrick...next time, I swear I'm going to tie your hands behind your back." she snarled. "I'll finish your horns off after you've splinted my ankle and stitched up my thighs."

Tyrick came down off of the pain and adrenaline as she spoke.  
"What the fuck do you mean, 'splint your ankle and stitch up your th'--shit! I did that?!" he asked, staring at her legs. "  
He wiped the blood from his face, and looked at Nehiri, who pointed to a box nearby her recuperacoon, over in the corner. The medikit.  
"There's thread and needles in there, and a splint. Do it." she said. "I know you know how."  
Tyrick didn't bother standing to go to get the kit; he rolled over onto his hands and knees and reached for it, easily bringing it to himself.  
A few moments later, and he was threading a suture needle, ready to stitch up the deeper claw marks in the Baroness' leg. It didn't take much time; they were deep, but not necessarily long.  
"Good. That'll do just fine. Now the ankle." Nehiri said, directing Tyrick to put her ankle in a splint. He'd crushed her lower leg bones, not really any of the smaller ankle bones. Well set and immobile, it would heal soon, especially if she slept in her 'coon.

"Alright. Back to it." Nehiri said, pulling Tyrick back to his spot between her legs. "Now I've got to shape them."

Armed with a fine-grit file and some sandpaper, Nehiri spent a while doing the meticulous part of horn-care. Filing them symmetrical.

Tyrick usually enjoyed this part; Nehiri's touch was soft, and unless she got into the nerve-ending filled outer pulp of his horns, it actually felt pretty good.

He started to nod off, with his head resting on the bed between Nehiri's thighs, as she carefully filed and sanded his horns back to points and thinned them down a bit to match all the way down. There were a few times where she made him squirm, almost, but not quite, getting into that outer layer, but overall, it was relaxing.

Tyrick had fallen asleep by the time Nehiri finished shaping his freshly-cut horns. She woke him up with a hard bite to the ear.  
Tyrick snarled, wanting to strangle her, before he realized that she'd woken him up.  
"There. I'm done." Nehiri said, wiping off some of the dust from sanding his horns. "Do you want me to polish them, too? Or are we going straight to the bath?"  
"Fuck the polish." Tyrick replied, standing up and stretching. He bent down and picked Nehiri up, holding her carefully to avoid pulling the sutures or doing anything to her ankle. "I'm a mess, you're even worse...Let's take a bath. If you're feeling up to it, I want you to wash my hair."

Nehiri rolled her eyes.  
"Let me guess. It hasn't had a good wash since she called you...that." she said.  
Tyrick declined to comment, taking a couple of steps to the door, bending at the waist to avoid knocking his now-overly sensitive horns on the doorframe, and walking across the hallway to Nehiri's bathroom.  
Obviously, she was right.


End file.
